Hello to All ! None of you know me, but I've been a SETI freak for many years. I quit crunching for SETI about 3 years ago, due to health problems. Nasty Stroke. I had heard that the project was down, and had no idea that it was back up and running again until I received an email, informing me that the project was up and back online ! Well, first thing I did was download the software, and start crunchin numbers again. Yes, I had problems at first, getting, "WORK", but that soon passed, and I have work all the time. While I was recovering, I did a little bit of work to my computer. Added memory, things like that. Now I'm crunching numbers like crazy !
Just want to say that I'm very glad that SETI is back, and am glad to see that there are a lot of people still working for the project.
Biker Jeff

whitewolf:
I do not seem to have been uploading or downloading fot the last week.S,ome data is 100% finished but it stays on my machine, there is now no activity as I have no new data. Leo
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I am new to SETI and am having second thoughts about wasting my computer time with all these outages. If this is supposed to be a professional set up then heaven help us if we ever find ET!!! I am seriously thinking of getting rid of SETI@home since these outages and lack of work means wasted energy. Time to switch off the computer at night again methinks.

I am new to SETI and am having second thoughts about wasting my computer time with all these outages. If this is supposed to be a professional set up then heaven help us if we ever find ET!!! I am seriously thinking of getting rid of SETI@home since these outages and lack of work means wasted energy. Time to switch off the computer at night again methinks.

Your computer does not use as much electricity when it is not working at crunching Seti. But if you would not normally let it run 24/7, shut it down for a few days. I have been shutting most of my rigs down during the day when my electric rates are higher to save on the bill a bit.

Unless the vexing hard drive problems that are the root cause of the current outage continue, I suspect the project will be back up within the next 3 days.

Hope you can hang in there until that time.

Meow.
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I am still the kittyman.
Accept no imitations.

I am new to SETI and am having second thoughts about wasting my computer time with all these outages. If this is supposed to be a professional set up then heaven help us if we ever find ET!!! I am seriously thinking of getting rid of SETI@home since these outages and lack of work means wasted energy. Time to switch off the computer at night again methinks.

So don't waste your computer time. Join another project as a backup, or even a main. SETI@Home is a professional science project that has more volunteers than any other project combined, meaning their servers are the most stressed. Last time I checked, there was no promise of 24/7 or even 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of promised uptime, so please don't hold them to that standard which was never promised.

They didn't even ask us to keep our computers running 24/7. They only asked to have the spare CPU cycles that go to waste when we're using our computers. If we leave our computers on 24/7, we're creating waste cycles, and thus we're giving the project more than they asked for. While that's great and all (and I do it too, so I'm not casting judgement), we have to remember that we did this and we're responsible for our resources, not the project.

Join another project during the downtime. You'll be glad you did. If you're of the mindset of "SETI only", then understand that you're putting all your eggs into one basket and you're asking for disaster.

I've been processing data for SETI@home for a decade or so now and am happy that I have been able to contribute to the effort. I don't think I have ever posted a message to a SETI@home message board before (perhaps once years ago, but don't remember.) At any rate, I hope what I have to say will convince you to stick around for a bit until the recent issues are resolved, or at least come back in a month or two when things should have settled down concerning the recent upgrades to SETI@home.

BTW: I am not a computer expert, but the posts to the 'technical info' section go back quite a ways and make for a very interesting read (and entertaining, even if one doesn't understand the technical details). There really are a lot of 'ups and downs' to the art of dealing with the hardware and software issues that are likely to happen with a project as long running, large and complicated as that at SETI@home.

(Many Kudos to the people that have managed to keep track of the ever growing list of technical and software threads that the whole thing go.)

There have been major hardware/software changes at SET@home during the last 6 months. A project 10 years running acquires a bit of effort to meld new state-of-the-art technology with existing hardware and software, some of which was perhaps a generation or more behind current technology, that has been part of a system that has been plugging away for many years and was getting rather old and cranky.

It kind of like when I had to recently reboot my 10 year old laptop and re-install Windows XP from scratch. Most of a day was spent simply catching up with 10 years worth of Service Paks and updates to my software and hardware drivers needed to make it all work again, and I still got a blue screen error a few days later having to do with a missing upgrade to the built-in graphics adapter.

The problems at SETI@home would probably take but minutes to fix, perhaps, if one didn't have to safely copy many terabytes of file information back and forth in the process. That process is, apparently, what is taking so long the last week or so.

Be patient.... once the technical bugs have been finally worked out, SETI@home should be quite stable and reliable for the next few years as well as being better able to expand capacity when needed.

SETI@home has been experiencing downtime due to various issues mentioned in my post a few minutes ago..

A solution might be to modify your BOINC computing preferences to cause it to download enough data to keep your system crunching away for an extended period of time. I would suggest something on the order of 7 to 14 days for at least the next few months until things settle down to a more normal routine at SETI@home..

Apparently SETI@home should be distributing workunits again in the next few days, so be sure to set up your preferences to grab a bunch to keep your system busy during future outages.

(If you are new to SETI@home be aware that I am uncertain how BOINC knows how much data you can handle at one time. It may be the case that it might take a week or two to adjust workunit allocation to fit your actual data processing capacity.)

Gary...

PS: The 'interesting (and rather entertaining) read' mentioned in my previous post can be found on the 'technical news' message board in a thread entitled 'Welcome to technical news (READ FIRST)'. Click to access 'archives of old technical news items ...'.
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bionic needs to do an update.....
I hit reset by accident anad it dumped all the downloads that i managed to get during a small uP window.
Now im at the mercy of the server, i cannot download anything.

This is shameful. 9 days, so how you will be able to find extraterrestrial life.
A Server is not so difficult to repair.

It is when your attempts to repair it are foiled by a subsequent additional drive failure, the OS gets borked, and you have to transfer a couple terrabytes of data out of the way before clearing the faults, reloading the OS, and transferring the data back again.
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I am still the kittyman.
Accept no imitations.

This is shameful. 9 days, so how you will be able to find extraterrestrial life.
A Server is not so difficult to repair.

It is when your attempts to repair it are foiled by a subsequent additional drive failure, the OS gets borked, and you have to transfer a couple terrabytes of data out of the way before clearing the faults, reloading the OS, and transferring the data back again.

It does take time to move 2TB of data off a degraded array, which was hopefully finished over the weekend without problems, before the updated OS is installed and all that data moved back then checking that the data is fully intact. ;)

Nothing official yet.....
Hoping for some updated news later this afternoon.
I do think they will let us know how it is progressing.
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I am still the kittyman.
Accept no imitations.

Since the other thread is locked, here’s my vote for making this forum, which is ostensibly for news, i.e. not the Complaints Department ;) or the Help Desk, read-only except to admins & mods. As I’ve never been either of those, nor am ever likely to be, I’m perfectly disinterested!

Ok, but now I seem to have a download problem of new workunits. Since a little after the project came back online my Boinc Manager has over 90 downloads in queue with status ( project deferred). Having a Download link capable of over 70Mb/sec and no throttling of download limit I am wondering what is happening.....

Ok, but now I seem to have a download problem of new workunits. Since a little after the project came back online my Boinc Manager has over 90 downloads in queue with status ( project deferred). Having a Download link capable of over 70Mb/sec and no throttling of download limit I am wondering what is happening.....

Regards,
Robert A. Reissaus

If you take a look at the Cricket graph you'll see that the link to the servers is maxed out so until the load on the link eases up in are in the same boat as the rest of us. ;)